Hey there,

I've been thinking a lot about what it looks like to invest in something that works before you can prove it works.

Yash Tekriwal runs ecosystem growth at Clay, and the way he thinks about building community, measuring ROI, and trusting his gut alongside his spreadsheet is something I think every executive needs to hear right now.

In this edition:

• 🎙️ The Ecosystem-Led Growth Playbook: How Clay Built a Community That Sells
• 📚 Marketing attribution and what to do when the data doesn't tell the whole story
• 🔧 Coming soon: Custom Integrations — connect any tool to Databox
• 💻 This week's silo-smashing GTM reads

🎙️ The Ecosystem-Led Growth Playbook: How Clay Built a Community That Sells 

Three years ago, Clay had nine people in a Williamsburg apartment. Today they're nearly 370, with 84 community chapters worldwide — and almost none of that growth came from a traditional sales motion.

Instead, they built an ecosystem with certifications, community chapters, live workshops, a talent marketplace, and a university. 

For a long time, it wasn't obvious it was working, but they kept going. Here’s what happened.

The six subgroups of Clay's ecosystem

Clay's ecosystem isn't a Slack group with a logo on it. It's six interconnected subgroups, each with its own metrics and role in the flywheel:

• Innovation — Startup and campus programs that get Clay in front of the next generation of GTM engineers early
  
  
• Community — 84 Clay Club chapters worldwide, plus a digital Slack community
  
  
• Live Trainings — Hands-on digital and in-person cohorts and workshops
  
  
• Clay University — Async self-serve learning hub at university.clay.com
  
  
• Certification and Badging — Skills-based credentialing built around real project work, not multiple choice tests
  
  
• Talent Marketplace — Job placement for certified Clay users inside companies that are actively hiring

Each subgroup feeds the next. User discovers Clay University, attends a live cohort, gets certified, lands a job at a company that now has a Clay champion embedded. That champion drives retention and expansion, and the flywheel spins.

The certification program nobody else would build

Yash opened with something most of us have felt but never said out loud:

"I have never seen a badging or a certification process that I have liked as a learner or an educator. Are you really gonna get a good sense of that from a couple of multiple choice questions and a proctored assessment? Probably not."

So Clay scrapped the multiple-choice test and built something that actually proves competency through real project work.

The business case underneath it is sharp: companies without a strong internal Clay champion are 60–80% more likely to churn at renewal. Certified Go-to-market (GTM) engineers placed inside customer accounts = direct influence on retention, without a single sales or CS motion attached to it.

See the full episode with Yash below:

IRL workshops and the unattributable growth engine

Clay runs in-person workshops for ~20 target customers at a time. No pitch. Just hands-on product time with people solving the same problems.

Attribution? Nearly impossible to measure cleanly. But deal velocity increases, contract sizes grow, and champions who were conceptually sold become emotionally invested. Yash mentioned a LinkedIn post where a buyer mapped all 16 of their Clay touchpoints before converting — including the workshop as the moment they finally got it. That post became its own growth engine.

If you're trying to build a better case for the channels that don't get last-click credit, Databox's Marketing Attribution Dashboard guide walks through the six main attribution models and how to build a dashboard that captures the full customer journey — not just the last touch.

The two types of data Clay tracks

When I asked whether Clay has a culture of not needing to track everything, Yash reframed the question entirely:

"We almost do track everything. But there are two types of data we take in. One is what everyone is used to — the financial metrics, the tracking, the planning, the spreadsheet. And then the other is just the feeling. Are you feeling the pull of the market? Are you feeling the pull of customers?"

Two types of data. Hard metrics and the feeling. Both count.

I wrote 3k words on why feeling matters on Linkedin if you want to read it. To be honest, it’s something I was surprised to hear while interviewing him on the podcast, but came around to once I thought about it.

Of course, I’m so focused on hard measurements based on what we do at Databox.  

When your hard metrics live in one place — standardized, verified, and accessible to everyone — the "feeling" conversations become a lot easier to defend.

The takeaways

• Start with education, not sales. Build the learning layer first — it creates pull a sales motion can't manufacture
• Design your certification to actually prove something. If it wouldn't impress a hiring manager, it won't drive retention
• Defend the unattributable. Build the language for it before you need it in a board meeting
• Let the flywheel compound. Clay slogged through five or six years before the ecosystem started to hum. Build before it's obvious

🎧 Get the full episode + playbook

📚 Related Resources

• Marketing Attribution Dashboard: How to Build One and Which Models to Use — The most practical guide we've published on measuring what's actually driving pipeline. A must-read if this episode got you thinking about your attribution setup. 
  
  

• Clay University — The async learning hub Yash mentioned. Start here if you want to explore Clay's GTM engineering use cases.
  
  

• Databox GA4 Acquisition Dashboard Template — Free, plug-and-play template for tracking where your traffic and leads are actually coming from across every channel.

🤖 Hard Metrics, Meet Your AI Analyst

If this episode taught us anything, it's that the teams winning right now are tracking two types of data: hard metrics and feelings. Genie is what makes the hard metrics side effortless, so you can spend more time paying attention to the feeling.

Ask a plain-language question, like "Why did MQL volume drop last month?" or "Which campaign drove the most pipeline this quarter?" and Genie gives you a clear, contextual answer drawn directly from your connected data.

No digging through three dashboards to piece together something you needed an hour ago. When you can get to the hard data faster, the qualitative signals get a seat at the table too.

Learn more about Genie here.

🔧 Coming Soon: Custom Integrations

Your tools should never be the reason your reporting is incomplete. If some of your most important data is still living in spreadsheets or pipelines that break without warning, we have good news.

Custom Integrations in Databox allow you to connect virtually any tool via API, build a full structured dataset, and analyze it in Databox alongside everything else, no developer required. If you've ever had to say, "we don't have that data in the dashboard yet," this is the answer.

Follow the official launch on Product Hunt here.

📰 This Week's Silo-Smashing GTM Reads

• Community-Led Growth Is the Most Underrated B2B Growth Engine
  Reframe on why the companies winning in B2B right now are investing in community before it generates pipeline.

• A Definitive Guide to Marketing Attribution 

  Growth marketing leader Tim Dalrymple (Webflow, Notion, Roadway) breaks down how to stop wasting your marketing budget

• Agentic Analytics in Practice

  How AI Moves from Answering Questions to Closing the Loop

🤝 How’d we do?